


A Seer Made

by Kes



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: (or the shaded tree...), Asgard, Character Study, Gen, Post-Thor: The Dark World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-02
Updated: 2015-01-02
Packaged: 2018-03-05 00:27:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3098201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kes/pseuds/Kes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are a lot of stories about Heimdall, and he hears them all. But there is a truth beneath the stories, and he is more than a story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Seer Made

There are a lot of stories about Heimdall, and he hears them all. It’s hard not to, for a man who can hear the furthest whisper of Yggdrasill, who knows that someone whispering his name could so easily be a knife in his king’s back if he does not heed it. Heimdall’s is a head that buzzes with stories, some the fragmented stuff of reality, others the more coherent realities he watches the universe construct about itself. All of the people tell stories.

Some are not so far off, figuratively if not in fact. There is the story of how the man who was Heimdall had left his body for the stars, but loved his land so much that he kept it animate as a watcher, a warner. Sometimes Heimdall feels like a galaxy, if not a universe, and there is no darkness within him; there is but another kind of light, an external part of his mind that is the only way he can hold this whole knowledge within him. That externality takes the form of the universe, the mirror form of the light he looks out into each day. Perhaps once, the teller of the tale studied in the great library of the palace, and gazed into Heimdall’s own gazing.

There is the tale that twins it with Odin’s lost eye, both his eye and Heimdall’s ear lost to the well of a beheaded man in exchange for wisdom, or power, or perception. Never mind that Heimdall stood upon Bifrost and watched Laufey’s ice put out Odin’s eye, and that his own ears are intact. Those tellers have never known him.

Some say that he was always thus, a seer born, not made. There are tales from the other side of the stars that in the olden days, the Norns were born thus; perhaps it is true. Heimdall is too young to know. Sometimes he feels too old to remember if he ever had truly been anything else. The boy who walked beneath the stars rather than among them is so far away now. There must still be something that remains of him, but on most days Heimdall forgets that there is anything to himself but the vessel. It is not a bad life, for he that lives it, but perhaps he would not choose it again.

From the moment his watch began, there have been those who said Odin set him there to watch for the ending days. It is an old story on Asgard, that one day all shall come to doom and destruction through the ice and the wolves and the fire, but it is not what Heimdall watches for. No, he is too old – too short-lived – to watch at the natural deathbed of the universe – and when an unnatural one threatened, what help had he been, he who saw so much but never his own blindness?

There is but one of him, and it weighs heavy on his thrice-plated shoulders. One man – or whatever he is now – who is still anchored in the body that has borne his mind down the years, still subject to its needs; sometimes he must sleep, though more rarely than any other, and he must eat, drink, dispose of the waste thus produced. And the tide of war is rising higher than it has been since his watch began, when he was only a little older than Thor is now. They had called them great wars, but even Odin had been young then; now, Heimdall looks and sees a universe thick with threats, and thick with their shadow where he cannot see them.

Already he has had failures. It is by his doubts that he remembers himself, doubts that are not of the stuff of starlight or the whispers in the air, but comprehensions in the mind alone. By these he sees threat, sees promise, understands how he must determine. There are times when a watcher must be more than a vessel. For whom does the watcher watch? For what purpose? To what ends? When he doubts the answers, so he must move. And so he has.

Heimdall regrets his complacencies, but not his treasons, which were born of his doubt. The watcher must watch not only what is without, but what is within, to see true.


End file.
